How to make Facebook Ads a Game Changer for your Business!

My transition to Digital Marketing started with Paid Advertisements. At that time, Facebook was just slowly picking up but Google still dominated the game, fast forward to 3 years and we see a whole new story. Facebook Ads have picked up tremendously and according to this new report by Neilsen, there is no going back.

So, yeah! Facebook is quite a big deal. Following are some of my experiences with this platform that might help you to advertise better on Facebook:

1. You need to have a very detailed analysis of your customer’s personas, you either work from the ground up and invest the required amount of time in developing content around those personas or you will always be shooting in the dark.

For example: If you have an e-commerce business, it’s essential that you know how your product aligns with your customer’s problems. Are you completely aware of your target market? Do you know the language your customers speak? How does your audience react to other brands in your same competitive niche?

It’s important to know all these things because, at the end of the day, your customer is not browsing Facebook to view ads. He/She is going to know what’s going around in his life and the people around him/her.

Your job as an advertiser is to blend in your advertisement in their newsfeed in a way that interests them or at least create some sort of a brand recall so they remember you next time anybody comes across a product/serve which you offer.

Persona Analysis is a step that is frequently neglected by Businesses (particularly the Small and Medium Business Enterprises) and I would highly recommend you to check out Hubspot’s Persona Analysis Template to get a headstart on this entire process.

2. You should be clear about your marketing objective and the stage of buyer’s journey for which you intend to advertise on Facebook

I have personally experienced that a lot of businesses are stuck in defining the stages of their buyer’s journey simply because they are not aware of Facebook’s powerful advertising options.

Facebook currently allows you to advertise based on your marketing objective and expands on these objectives with a wide set of media categories for your ad to render across Facebook’s Owned and Partnered Properties.

Once you are absolutely clear with the kind of marketing objective that you have in mind, you will be in a much better position to craft your content and advertise within the best reach in your selected budget range.

My best bet is that if you are only focusing on the reach then you go for the Reach Objective under Awareness Objective inside your Facebook Ad Manager.

But bear this in mind that Awareness is suited to only certain types of ads (particularly in my opinion these classify under non-promotional/educational)

3. Take advantage of Interest-Based Targeting to expand your reach 

Facebook is a huge platform that operates on millions of interest categories. Once you start building ads, you will see an expansive list of suggestions that Facebook begins to recommend as you input certain interest categories in the Audience Section of ad creation. In my experience, if you are operating in an extremely tight niche segment, it’s best to take advantage of broad categories of interest since this will broaden up your reach by 2x-5x.

Here’s an audience that I had created for a Baby Care Brand that gave us a potential reach of 8.5 Million People

As I began to employ this audience in a different kind of Campaigns, the results were astonishing since I was able to capture a large segment of Audience for my niche products.

Here is a quick result snippet:

We had a 10x increase in our Blog Traffic through Facebook and a 40% upward trend in our sales figures last year. I can confidently attribute all these numbers to Facebook Sponsored Campaigns.

Apart from the steps that I have mentioned below, you can also employ these additional steps to increase your reach in Facebook Campaigns.

Experiment with Remarketing Audiences (try to test them by combining them with your interest target categories or creating separate campaigns altogether)

Run frequent contests that promote your brand organically and encourage people to share your content (In my experience Quizzes/Contests/Polls work best since they invoke curiosity and come with an added benefit of increasing your shares which directly increase your reach)

Run your campaigns with a “You are charged when” objective set to Impressions and “Ad Delivery” options set to “Reach” - these tweaks will ensure that Facebook is optimizing your ads for the highest reach.

Make sure that your ad does not contain more than 20% text or no text at all.

Facebook also gives out frequent warnings in-case you don’t meet these ad-specifications guidelines and will directly impact your reach if you don’t follow these guidelines on a regular basis.